Service providers, and particularly providers of emergency services such as fire, police, and rescue departments, often have a desire and a need to follow up on calls which are placed to them but then are abandoned. For example, a call to a fire department may be abandoned as a result of fire damage to the calling equipment or line, so the fire department needs to follow up on the call to determine whether a fire exists. Or a call to a police department by a crime victim may be abandoned by action of the criminal, so the police department needs to follow up on the call to determine if a crime has been committed and to rescue the victim.
For many non-emergency services, knowing the originating telephone number of the abandoned call is sufficient for follow-up: knowing the number enables the service provider to call the caller back. However, for most emergency services, knowing the originating telephone number of the abandoned call is not enough, as the above examples amply illustrate. More information about the abandoned call is needed, particularly the address from which the call originated.
Emergency service equipment, such as enhanced 911 (E911) emergency call service equipment, often automatically provides information about a call, including the address from which the call originated, once the call has been answered by an emergency service agent. When a call is received by the emergency service equipment, the ANI (Automatic Number Identification) telephony service feature provides the equipment with the originating, i.e., the calling, number for the call. The number is stored and the call is placed in a queue to await assignment to an available agent. Once the call has been assigned to an agent, the equipment makes a request to a remote database of information about telephone numbers, including their addresses, to provide information about the calling number. The calling number, and the identity of the agent to whom the call is assigned, are provided as part of the request. The requested information is provided by the database to the requesting emergency service equipment, which then directs it to the appropriate agent. When the agent answers the call, the information is displayed on the agent's terminal.
Unfortunately, the information about the calling number is not provided by the emergency service equipment for calls that have been abandoned prior to being delivered to an agent. At best, the equipment provides a printed record of abandoned calls that includes the calling numbers. But it specifically does not obtain from the database and display the address of the calling number and--for various reasons such as security of the database against unauthorized access--emergency service personnel do not have ready access--and often have no access at all--to the information in the database once the call has been abandoned. Consequently, their efforts at follow-up of abandoned calls are seriously hampered.
A further disadvantage of the emergency service equipment such as the conventional E911 equipment characterized above, is that it is dedicated to serving emergency calls and emergency service agents only. Hence, separate equipment must be provided to serve other calls and other communities of users, even when the emergency service equipment has call-handling capacity in excess of that required to handle emergency calls. This is clearly inefficient.